The advent of global communications networks such as the Internet has served as a catalyst for the convergence of computing power and services in portable computing devices. For example, in the recent past, portable devices such as cellular telephones and personal data assistants (PDAs) have employed separate functionality for voice communications and personal information storage, respectively. Today, these functionalities can be found in a single portable device, for example, a cell phone that employs multimodal functionality via increased computing power in hardware and software. Such devices are more commonly referred to as “smartphones.”
With the technological advances in handheld and portable devices, there is an ongoing and increasing need to maximize the benefit of these continually emerging technologies. Given the advances in storage and computing power of such portable wireless computing devices, they now are capable of handling many types of disparate data types such as images, video clips, audio data, and electronic organizers for managing and organizing a variety of PIM (personal information manager) data, for example. This data is typically utilized separately for specific purposes.
The Internet has also brought internationalization by bringing millions of network users into contact with one another via mobile devices (e.g., telephones), e-mail, websites, etc., some of which can provide some level of textual translation. For example, a user can select their browser to install language plug-ins which facilitate some level of textual translation from one language text to another when the user accesses a website in a foreign country. However, the world is also becoming more mobile. More and more people are traveling for business and for pleasure. This presents situations where people are now face-to-face with individuals and/or situations in a foreign country where language barriers can be a problem. For a number of multilingual mobile assistant scenarios, speech translation is a very high bar. A mechanism is needed that can exploit the increased computing power of portable devices to enhance user translation experience.